The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [334]
Sophie again meets the female criminal Dubois, who tries to involve her in stealing a rich man's money. When the honest Sophie warns him what is afoot, the man wants to reward her by proposing marriage, but Dubois manages to poison him. Finally, staying in another inn which catches fire, Sophie bravely tries to rescue a woman's baby from the flames, but stumbles and drops the child to its death, whereupon she is accused by the mother of murder and of having started the fire in the first place. It is for these crimes that Sophie is now being taken for trial under police guard, when she arrives at the hotel to pour out her story to Juliette and her lover. And of course the penny finally drops that her name is not really `Sophie; but Justine, and that she is Juliette's long-lost sister.
Now blissfully reunited, the two sisters go off to the chateau bought for Juliette by her lover, where they all live happily together until the summer's day when a great storm brews up and a terrified Juliette asks her sister to close the windows. As Justine is wrestling with one window in the wind, a mighty bolt of lightning flashes from the sky and she is hurled lifeless into the middle of the room. Naturally the author is keen to describe how `the bolt had entered by her right breast, had blasted her thorax and come out again through her mouth, so disfiguring her face that she was hideous to look at. He has degraded his heroine for the last time. There are no more indignities left for his fantasy-self to heap on her.
The cult of sensation
These two examples provide a perfect case-study of how the fantasy-self creates stories, as this moves towards its extremes. By the law of the `dark inversion, the ego takes the archetypal values programmed into the unconscious Self and turns them on their head. The defining feature of Justine is that, in two-dimensional fashion, she represents the essence of what is the highest value in storytelling, the `light feminine'. She is physically beautiful, pure-minded, good-hearted, spiritually devout. She is the anima, the heart and soul of mankind. She is Penelope, Andromeda, Dante's Beatrice, Shakespeare's Perdita, Beethoven's Leonora, Cinderella. She is the `Princess' whom only the true hero can win, when he has shown himself fit to be united with her because he is himself potentially whole. Yet the whole thrust of de Sade's fantasy is to show this shining symbolic figure being defiled and violated in every way he can imagine, by a series of male and female monsters who in every case end up, he is careful to emphasise, prospering from their villainy. Father Raphael is promoted to one of the highest posts in the Church. The forger enjoys his ill-gotten gains in Venice. The homosexual matricidal Marquis inherits two vast fortunes. The sadistic medical man is appointed doctor to the King of Sweden. Dubois escapes with the money she has stolen. Even Juliette, after her long career as a murderous whore, ends up rich and happy in her pseudo-marriage (although, at the end, it is wholly inconsistent with everything else we know of her character that she should show such compassion and joy in rediscovering her lost sister).
Only the virtuous Justine has to be shown facing endless reverses, betrayals and sufferings, each time precisely because she is virtuous. It is because either she has thrown herself on someone else's mercy or has selflessly tried